SOUNDING TOOLS AND SYMBOLS OF OFFICE. AN OLD FIND REVISITED - L.10621: A MOUTH BOW FROM MOLINA DI LEDRO PILE-DWELLING?

The Ledro pile-dwelling is one of the most important Bronze Age complexes in northern Italy. The settlement lies in the Ledro lake valley, at the south-western end of the Trentino region; thanks to work on an electric plant in 1929 the lake’s water-level lowered, thus revealing a large piling zone, immediately recognised by the Soprintendenza alle Antichità di Padova as a prehistoric settlement. In that same year the Soprintendente E. Ghislanzoni carried out a first, restricted, excavation. The pile-dwelling was completely explored in 1937, under the direction of R. Battaglia (Università di Padova): the stratigraphic excavation covered an area of 4,500 m2 and brought to light nearly 10,000 piles. The archaeological record allows us to assign the settlement to a period between the beginning of the Early Bronze age (end of the 3rd millennium B.C.) and the Middle Bronze age, with some material assignable to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age (half of the 2nd millennium B.C.). Noteworthy, among the great number of objects recovered from the pile-dwelling of Ledro, is an extraordinary amount of wooden instruments, including at least six bows; moreover, during further excavations carried out in the sixties, another bow was found. Unfortunately R. Battaglia did not finish the studies and publication of the archaeological material which, during the past years, has lost its original stratigraphic data; consequently, the bow presented in this session, just as the other bows found in the pile-dwelling, can no longer be placed in its original context. Over the years many studies on the palafitte of Ledro were published, but it wasn’t until 1990 that a methodical research on the bows was started. Most of them are over 100 cm long and roughly worked to be effective as weapons (No. Inv. L10709, L10622, L10712 and L829), while two of them are too small to serve this purpose (No. Inv. L5136 and L10621). One of the two is shaped exactly like the larger ones (No.Inv. L5136), and thus is probably a toy-replica.